Here is a message from the President:
I’m looking forward to the club’s Grafting Event that will be held on March 10th. Our members have been busy collecting scion wood, and there will be over 100 varieties available. There will also be a fair selection of rootstocks. Several grafters have volunteered do perform custom grafting, We will also have tool sharpening services available. Thanks to all who have volunteered to help out, including those not mentioned here.
As part of this event, we are offering the chance for members to bring their extra plants and horticultural equipment, including books. We will again have several kiwi and fig plants to sell (at a very reasonable cost; donated by Kiwibob Glanzman. There will be several young fruit trees that were donated by Raintree Nursery last year, and nurtured though the year by a couple of members. And, there will be something unusual that you can’t help but try.
We will begin the day, as we do with all our meetings, with a meet and greet (while snacking on the delicious potluck items this club is known for), followed by a brief business meeting. By 11:00, the grafting activities will commence, as will our presentations.

12:30 – 1:30 –Kiwi and Fig Propagation Techniques (Kiwibob Glazman)
Kiwibob will give a hands-on demonstration of propagating techniques for Kiwi and Figs. Kiwibob is the recognized local authority on these fruit crops. He grows several varieties of figs, and several species of kiwi, including Actinidia deliciosa, Actinidia arguta, Actinidia kolomikta, Actinidia melanandra, Actinidia tetramera, Actinidia purpurea, Actinidia polygama, and others.

1:30 – 2:30 – Grafting Vegetable Crops (Pinki Devi and Abigail Attavar)
Grafting is a horticultural technique that joins two plants through the connection of their stem vascular tissues, to take advantage of their combined characteristics. The earliest record of vegetable grafting is from 500 AD in China (Lee and Oda, 2003), commercial grafting started in Japan in the 1920s to overcome soil borne diseases in watermelon. Vegetable grafting was introduced to Europe in the 1960s and was brought to North America in the 1990s. The commonly used grafting methods are splice grafting, one-cotyledon grafting, and hole insertion grafting. Vegetable grafting is now gaining popularity because of the phase-out of methyl bromide as a soil fumigant for conventional agriculture, and it is an effective biological disease management tool for organic agriculture. Grafting has the potential to increase commercial cucurbit and solanaceous crop production in the U.S. by overcoming soil-borne pathogen barriers by providing a more vigorous root system, and by increasing fruit quality and improving water and nutrient uptake efficiency. Our current research studies are investigating how to optimize vegetable grafting methods and crop productivity and improve resistance of grafted vegetables to Verticillium wilt.

See you all on Saturday 3/10/2018. If you can’t make the grafting event, come join our monthly meetings on the second Saturday. We meet almost every month at The Brig building, which is located in Magnusson Park in Seattle. See calendar for dates.